It is demanded to improve fuel efficiency of vehicular engines to reduce loads to environment. To attain this object, it is necessary to control the engine minutely, by detecting fuel combustion state in engine cylinders and returning a feedback of the fuel combustion state to the fuel combustion controls. In order to detect the fuel combustion state in the engine cylinder, it is effective to detect gas temperature in the engine cylinders.
JP-H5-172649-A, for example, discloses a high-temperature thermistor as conventional temperature detecting device for detecting atmospheric gas temperature. The high-temperature thermistor has a construction in which glass sealing is applied to the chip thermistor to prevent oxidation.
In a temperature sensor equipped with this kind of high-temperature thermistor, however, a size of the chip thermistor is relatively large approximately as 0.5 mm to 1 mm, and the chip thermistor to which glass sealing is applied has a relatively large heat capacity. Thus, response of the temperature sensor is slow relative to rapid change in the gas temperature. Accordingly, the temperature sensor equipped with the above-mentioned temperature detecting device cannot quickly respond to the rapid change in the gas temperature in the engine cylinder that repeats strokes of intake, compression, combustion and exhaustion at rotational speed of 800-7000 rpm, for example.